Table of Contents

Preface
Part I. Contexts
Chapter 1. Prosody and Purpose
Chapter 2. Ars Metrica
Chapter 3. Rude and Beggerly Ryming: The Romance Tradition
Chapter 4. A Question of Language: Italy and the Shaping of Renaissance Prosodic Theory
Chapter 5. Notes of Instruction
Part II. Performances
Chapter 6. A Straunge Metre Worthy To Be Embraced
Chapter 7. Jasper Heywood's Fourteeners
Chapter 8. Gorboduc and Dramatic Blank Verse, with a Note on Comedy
Chapter 9. Heroic Experiments
Chapter 10. Speech and Verse in Later Elizabethan Drama
Chapter 11. True Musical Delight
Notes
Index

About the Author

O. B. Hardison Jr. was the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He taught at the University of North Carolina, Princeton University, and the University of Tennessee. Among his books are Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (awarded the Haskins Medal by the Mediaeval Society of America); The Enduring Monument; Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary; The Forms of Imagination; and The Quest for Imagination.

Reviews

Two large points that emerge are the importance of 'construction' and, perhaps more surprisingly, 'the dominance of syllabic concepts of prosody.' Hardison concludes that the English verse of this period 'is best understood in terms of this tradition.' He has written a learned, interesting, and civilized book.
—Studies in English Literature